P.A system in Arthur Ashe stadium (US Open Tennis)

[mtidge]

My first post, so I'm not quite sure if this is the correct forum. I went to the US Open this year and I noticed something about the sound system, it is horrible. The first problem is same at all stadiums I've been to in the recent past, they can't help themselves from playing loud bass heavy music. In the past, at a tennis tournament they might play a song that a player picked when the player entered the court, that was it, same with baseball, maybe the organ player would play between innings. Now, every slow or what was once a quiet moment they blast crappy music. My guess is they paid for a huge sound system so they want to use it. Back to this particular stadium, based on what I heard there are many large sub woofers located somewhere in the stadium, I just couldn't spot them. I was in a skybox (I'm not special, just lucky to have a friend that works for a big corporation that has the box) and for each box of about 20 seats there is a single JBL speaker mounted on the back wall. The boxes are glass in the back with sloped concrete walls between them and there are roughly 100 of these boxes in two rows around the entire stadium. Beyond this I'm certain there are many large arrays of sound re-enforcement speakers. My second complaint is when they did the on court interviews after the match with the players the voices were unintelligible, hard as I tried I could not understand much of the dialog. I can only imagine that the sound system must cost an incredible price but is unable to do it's primary job of delivering clear sound. I suspect part of the problem is the 100 glass and steel boxes each with a speaker in it causing also sorts of fidelity problems.